After a slightly longer than planned break, we jump
straight back into the heat of things and see whether or not 4850 twosomes are
recommendable. As has become customary, we have some slightly boring stuff that
no one reads placed at the beginning of the article, which gives an idea of what
we've done.

We've moved from having a large heterogenous mix of in-game settings
to testing according to 3 exact presets:

BASELINE: this is the game set to
its maximum quality settings, but without any AA or AF enabled

CROSSFIRE EXTREME QUALITY: still
maximum in-game settings and 16X AF, but we're using the Crossfire
exclusive 16X AA mode- this mode can only be forced through the CCC and
thus will only work in games that support such forcing; we're
investigating it since it probably is of interest to quite a few people
out there

For games that have no support for AA-
Stalker, Timeshift, Bioshock DX10, Gothic 3, the baseline setting has
16X AF enabled

We're using the presets in an effort to improve overall readability
and usability of the data we provide.

Most in-built benchmarking utilities have
been relinquished in favor of FRAPS runs - while we most certainly don't
consider this to be the be-all end-all of testing, it is probably a better
way of showing how the games tested will actually perform in practice

We've also moved from averaging three
3-minute runs with FRAPS to averaging six of them. This should help
remove some of the inherent variability associated with FRAPS testing.

All tests are run at 1920x1200 unless otherwise specified.

For each game, a graph will be presented to
you showing the percentile increase of card A vs card B- the percentile
increase is calculated as (A-B)/B and expressed in percentage points

Since we're looking at Crossfire (CF), we'll
have to talk about the most recently discovered doomsday device, one which sends
shudders down multi-GPU enthusiasts' spines - micro-stuttering. A fairly
extensive bit of the 4850 closing thoughts (yep, those are almost here) will be
dedicated to figuring out what this horror story is all about and whether or not
the world of multi-GPU users is ending.

We won't be recycling general comments about
each game (it's a poor way of giving the illusion of extra content), but rather
go ahead and show results directly, with what we hope will be relevant comments
made where necessary.

Here are the specs for the system we used during
testing:

As you can see we're using a slightly
overclocked 3870X2 card from Gecube for illustrating CF performances of the old
lineup, and we've also achieved driver parity for this round of tests, as
opposed to the single card ones where we had to use the slightly older Catalyst
8.5s for the 3870.